The Oddity
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: Ongoing character study drabbles of the kuniochi who never get enough screen time. Through pianos and therapists and chopsticks and alternate universes. Hinata, Sakura, Tsunade, Tenten.
1. Hyuuga Hinata

**Story**: The Oddity

**Title**: The Piano

**Summary**: "When her fingers slide over the keys, when the dips in her fingerprints catch on the lip of the ivory, she can pretend so many things."

**Character**: Hyuuga Hinata

**Disclaimer**: Do not own.

**Notes**: Erm. So, this is an experiment. My first _Naruto_, and of course I chose character studies. I've already written Sakura's, which will go up next, but I'm not exactly sure who to do next. Help?

* * *

She used to play the piano.

When her fingers slide over the keys, when the dips in her fingerprints catch on the lip of the ivory, she can pretend so many things. She can pretend that she is beautiful, that she is open and happy and that she doesn't spend most of her time wishing she were better. There isn't improvement needed, here. For once – just once, the only place – she can rely on talent and skill and she can feel her own strength.

When she plays, people stop and listen.

They don't know who she is, this little girl with her closed eyes and her sad mouth and pale skin, but they envy her. They cluster around, quiet, and the music rushes into their minds, through their eyes and their ears and their mouths, and they can almost taste the melody brushing the back of their tongues.

Even as they envy her ability, her sadness pulls them in. They wonder if she is blind, if she is alone, if she has anyone other than the little dilapidated piano sitting in the window of the music store. They all wonder, and they all leave, after a while. They all notice her, but eventually the melancholy drives them away.

* * *

Eventually, the melancholy drives her away.

* * *

At sixteen, she still has closed eyes and a sad mouth and pale skin, but she hasn't touched the keys in ten years.

She is drawn to the instrument alone in the dark corner, to the sticking keys and the limp strings, and she sits down and gentle presses down. The note that echoes is wildly off-key, warbled and ugly. It sounds rather like she feels. They still haven't noticed that she's gone, still sitting there chatting and laughing and being lovely and perfect, so she sits and _tap tap taps_, and suddenly the music is drowning her, is clogging her mind and breath and she gasps, hands flopping off of the piano. The chord that sounds is pleasing in its dissonance, and it helps.

She stands up abruptly, and leaves. When she slides back into her seat, they still haven't noticed that she left.

* * *

At eighteen, she has a sad mouth and pale skin, but her eyes are open.

Across the table from her, sipping from a dish of sake, is a concert pianist. His fingers are smooth and their prints do not catch on the lips of keys. He is considered a prodigy, and she is here to kill him.

But before she does so, she listens to him play.

He is drunk, but the music he plays is studied and controlled and unmistakably violent. She sees the danger in him in the notes that rise off of the keys, harsh and precise. But there is beauty in everything he does, beauty that she can only have when she is pretending to be someone else. The music strips away everything and leaves only the truth.

So she leans over him as he plays, presses her cheek to the top of his head, and slits his throat onto the keys. He dies playing music, and those five final notes ring in her ears for years.

* * *

At twenty-one, she has pale skin, but her mouth is upturned.

She sits before a piano again, and her silk sleeves rustle like river grass. She can feel the weight of his gaze on her back – _you don't have to do this, you don't have to_ – and it presses down on her fingers. The chord is pretty, and it makes her frown for a moment.

She doesn't want pretty. Her music has always been ugly and sad, just as she has always been ugly and sad.

But, she reflects, at the moment she is neither, so perhaps it is time for her to play something different. She slides along the keys, selecting her favorites, her old friends, tangling them together so they weave scraps of cloth that shimmers and shifts like the silk of the loose kimono she is wrapped in. She is still little and quiet, but her eyes are open on his, and her mouth curls at the corners, and her skin is flushed because there is melancholy in her music, but it is muted and leaves only the faintest aftertaste of bitterness, something that used to be there but she has now forgotten.

People stop and listen.

* * *

_**Next:** Sakura.  
_


	2. Haruno Sakura

**Story**: The Oddity

**Title**: Therapy

**Summary**: "The City is like Netherland. Children come here and they never grow up."

**Character**: Haruno Sakura, who gets way too much shit for being a regular teenage girl.

**Disclaimer**: Do not own.

**Notes**: At this point I'm pretty sure no one is reading this . . . which is discouraging. Ah, well. If you're out there, drop me a line. Offer a character suggestion. I'm kind of at a stand-still.

* * *

"I don't believe in fate," she says at once.

"Oh?" I ask. She looks young to be so cynical, but I'm not condescending enough to say it aloud. "Why?"

"She doesn't care anymore." The girl eyes me from under a curtain of pink hair. "Why should she? We're too sick to fuck around with."

"Ah," I say. I know, even without the information written in her neat little file, that she is from the Konoha district. They travel in teams in those parts. "Where's the rest of your team?" I ask.

She props her heavy black boots on my desk and blinks at me, her hair falling haphazardly around a face that is too angelic to hold a Konoha sweeper. The wear on her gloves begs to differ.

"Team?" she finally says.

"You're from the Konoha district," I say. "Where are the other three people in your team?" Her little file says that her name is Rin. I highly doubt that it's true.

"Team?" she repeats. "Golly gee, I have no idea what you mean." She tightens the strap on her left glove casually. Her eyes are green and one-dimmensional.

"Who are you looking for?" I ask. I lean back in my chair and remove my glasses. "Hozuki Suigetsu? He's about your age, I believe." She looks at me flatly, but I see I am close. Not him, then. But someone close to him, maybe a member of his own team.

"Never heard of him," she says tonelessly.

"Really?" I feign surprise. "You've never heard of Team Hebi? They're famous in these parts. Or, should I say, infamous." She doesn't move, and it is the immobility that gives away her interest. Someone has trained her well, but I am better. It's my job, after all, to see inside her head.

"No," she says.

"Oh," I say. "Word is that Uchiha Sasuke is from the Konoha district. You wouldn't happen to know him, would you?" The leather in her gloves crinkles as her fist clenches. She is here for the Uchiha boy.

The Uchiha boy has gone, two days before, into the Suna district. I consider telling her this.

"How do you know him?" I ask instead.

"Know who?" she says. "I don't know anyone."

"Uchiha Sasuke. Were you on a sweeper team together? Friends before this?"

There is a twitch in the corner of her lips. "I wouldn't say friends," she says. "I annoy the shit out of him. He annoys the shit out of me."

"Hm," I say. I know the sound is infuriating. "Hm," I say again.

"What?" she demands.

"Nothing," I reply. "Just . . . hm."

We sit in silence for a few minutes.

"He's an idiot," she says finally. "Wants to kill his brother. Won't come home until he does." I know this already, of course. There aren't a lot of people in The City who don't know about the Uchiha detonation that tore up half of the Konoha district.

"Retrieval team?" I ask.

She eyeballs me. "Not technically," she concedes. "He's a teammate."

Ah. Loyalty runs deep in Konoha. It's not something the other districts have grasped yet. Eventually they will, and Konoha's brief stint as head district will end.

Even here, in Nami, the only district that has exiled teams and is always, always neutral in the district wars, we fear the fall of Konoha.

"How long has he been searching?" I don't want to know about this petulant Uchiha boy, who has already been in my office and sat staring at the walls for the requisite hour. I want to know about her, "Rin," who has pink hair and green eyes and dusty knuckles. This is my only chance. By tomorrow, her team will have broken in and taken her back, just as Hebi took Uchiha.

No one stopped them. Nami has long ago given up on saving these children.

"Two years," she says, and for all the weight in the words, it might as well be two centuries.

"You were what, thirteen?" I ask. She nods absently, and doesn't seem to realize that she has just given me her age, one of those few pieces of information we can use. "Have you spent the past two years looking for him?"

She shrugs.

"Learning?" I prompt.

She cracks a knuckle on her left hand. I take this to be assent, but I don't want her apathy.

"Do you honestly think that you'll find him?" I ask, placing my glasses back on my nose. They recreate a barrier, one that I want, for now, to enforce. "Two years is a while. How long were you on a team with him before he left? A year, if that?"

"Sasuke-kun," she snaps, "will come home. If Naruto and I have to break every bone in his body."

I know who she is now.

"Why so defensive," I say, tone mocking. "You must have utter faith in your own abilities of persuasion. How many sweepers have you killed, looking for him? That's quite a few notches in your lipstick case, kid." She reacts as I expect, dropping her feet from my desk with a _thump_. She jumps to her feet and in seconds is screaming in my face.

"You have no idea," she shrieks, slamming her fists into the surface of my desk. "You have no idea!" She is still yelling when, a minute later, her hour ends and security comes in to take her away.

She is Haruno Sakura.

She has a reputation of being tough and fair and having a healing touch.

She is in love with the Uchiha boy, enough to face exile from the Konoha district to find him.

She is fifteen. She is a child.

She has blood on her hands, blood she will never be able to justify.

And I am just a youth counselor, spending hour-long blocks with children like her, dead inside. They never stay longer than a single night.

The City is like Netherland. Children come here and they never grow up.

* * *

_This was uplifting, right? Hehe. Thoughts?_

_**Next**: No fracking clue._


	3. Tsunade

**Story**: The Oddity

**Title**: Twice-Cursed

**Summary**: "She is, like Uchiha Sasuke, the last of her kind."

**Character**: Tsunade

**Disclaimer**: Do not own.

**Notes**: SPOILERS for chapter 405. I mean, if you're up to date until 404, nothing too bad. Because you already know. But just in case.

* * *

He's . . . nice.

_Hey, 'Nade, want to go out with me tonight?_

It's odd. Odd enough that she says yes and they go out and they dance and they drink and they shimmy like they're both teenagers. He kisses like she's breakable and she fucks him like he isn't.

They're both liars.

(So is the necklace. She gives it to him and hopes that he'll last.)

* * *

In the end she doesn't know how to feel about his death. So for a little while she doesn't bother feeling at all. She simply acts and moves through life. She dreams about tiny things in a sea of fog. She remembers fucking him, she remembers drinking with him, she remembers stumbling home after a mission, The Mission, when she knew that that stupid purple-tongued idiot wasn't coming home, and his arms locking behind her.

She remembers slipping the chain over his neck, kissing his collarbone, whispering in his ear _Come home_.

She wakes up screaming at lot, for those first few months. Then she learns to cry.

* * *

After a while she forgets how to cry, too. She is a Wanderer, with all that entails. She doesn't make friends and have lovers; she just floats from village to village, eternally young and wise. She has acquaintances and one night stands and drinking buddies. There are four people that really, truly know her, and two of them are asses and one of them is dead. The fourth is off in the Land of Bureaucracy and doesn't have time to answer her petty questions.

She never bothers writing letters home, because she's not quite sure where home is.

* * *

Some days, home isn't there at all, and most days it's nestled between her breasts on a long chain.

* * *

Seeing him again is like hitting herself in the stomach (all chakra, no holding back). She is hiding, watching him and some short blonde with spiky hair that reminded her of another idiot kid she used to know (_Don't worry, you can give me a love letter later_). She doesn't know if the tree she wants to uproot is for hitting him or herself, so she settles for running away.

When they meet again, she is prepared.

* * *

She's gone through this once before.

She was younger and blonder and less experienced, and she was still going on missions. She couldn't name the members of the Council and their immediate family members, she couldn't schmooze, she drank (a little) less.

But there is something familiar about looking into his eyes and realizing that she would do a lot for this man – that she hated him almost as much as she loved him.

"I hate you," she tells him as she slams his back into the wall. _I love you_, she thinks as she runs her fingers through his hair and her tongue down the stripes on his face.

Even if she still had the necklace, she wouldn't give it to him. He doesn't need the luck or the protection or the thought beneath them. He's just him.

* * *

The kid is still spiky and blonde but he's not as short as he used to be; there is something in his eyes that she can't bear seeing. It's like meeting judge, jury, and executioner in one fell stroke, and they're all screaming that she's so fucking guilty she should be combusting under this glare.

If the kid could channel it into a jutsu, it could probably decimate any S-class he came across in his future.

Depending, that is, on how long his future is. _Her_ spiky-haired idiot lasted a lot longer than either of them expected – hell, there must have been something in the drinking water on one of those genin missions because all of them, even the Third, lasted ridiculously long.

The thought that she's the only one left hits her suddenly. She doesn't know why it took her so long to realize.

She's fifty and she's been in love twice. Once was sweet and short. The other was longer and violent and twisted. Both are, in essence, herself. She is twisted and occasionally nice and usually a bitch. She found love in Dan but she found her soul in Jiraiya and now that stupid, stupid man has died and left her behind.

They all left her behind.

She is, like Uchiha Sasuke, the last of her kind.

It is for this she weeps.

* * *

_Right, so, I told myself that none of these were going to be about the men in the life of the women I'm chronicling. Heh, look how that turned out. This was supposed to be about the necklace . . . but it ended up not. Sort of. Aaargh. Thoughts? Help? I don't know who to do next. I wasn't even going to do Tsunade . . . except chapter 405 hit me like a lead balloon.  
_


	4. Tenten

**Story**: The Oddity

**Title**: Chopsticks

**Summary**: "In her infant way, she knows that these are Bad Things, which Tenten is Not Allowed to Touch; this doesn't stop her, however, from picking up a chopstick and rubbing it between her little fingers."

**Character**: Tenten

**Disclaimer**: Unowned.

**Notes**: Well . . . this is it. For now at least, I suppose. Tenten has always been my favorite character, and so finishing with her seems right. I'm working on a Neji/Tenten 1940's noir-esque mystery at the moment (whew, mouthful), and it'll probably be posted in a few days. If any of you are interested. So thanks to those of you who took the time to review, and to those of you who stopped by at all.

* * *

At age two, Tenten sits at the kitchen table of the orphanage where she was deposited by mysterious parents ("The vanishing sort, Hokage-sama. No one important, to be sure – but odd-looking"). Sitting on the table in front of her is a pair of chopsticks.

"Oh my god," says the teenager who is supposed to be making her dinner. "He said _what_? That _ass_. I hope you buried a kunai into his _rectum_, that _freak_." She is talking into the phone nestled into her shoulder, gesturing with a spoon. Flecks of broth splatter across the linoleum floor.

Tenten looks at the chopsticks in front of her. In her infant way, she knows that these are Bad Things, which Tenten is Not Allowed to Touch; this doesn't stop her, however, from picking up a chopstick and rubbing it between her little fingers. Her motor control is fine for her age, but certainly not deft enough to handle the slim wooden stick.

Or, at least, it shouldn't.

The teenager pauses to listen to her friend. She tastes the salty broth and makes a face. "Wait," she interrupts. "So you didn't kill him? God, I would've. For Kami's sake, Hi-chan . . ."

Tenten curls her index finger around the chopstick and pushes with her thumb. With a slight twitch, the chopstick spins in her hand and flips over her knuckles. It takes her two more times before she can catch it to the palm of her hand.

"I know! I _know_. It's like, what? What? Who do you think you are?"

Tenten's eyes narrow. She twirls the chopstick around twice, and then a third time, and then the chopstick is moving quickly (too quickly, to be manipulated by a two-year-old with scraggly pigtails who doesn't speak). The teenager doesn't notice, pouring herself a glass of something from a pitcher on the counter.

The chopstick is a blur around her hand, making a little _whoosp_ every time it slaps against her first knuckle. Her whole body bends forward and back with the rhythm, a _whoosp whoosp whoosp whoospwhoospwhoosp_, speeding up, faster faster fasterfasterfaster.

The teenager sees Tenten and drops the phone.

From the forgotten headset, her friend's tinny voice prattles on.

* * *

The orphanage master, who is already getting trouble with the new blonde baby boy, takes her to the Hokage's office. He sits there, fingers steepled, and watches as the master hands Tenten a chopstick. She is already bored by it, though, and refuses. She doesn't speak, ever. She doesn't tell them anything helpful.

Over her head a conversation is being conducted, about her missing parents and the trunk they left behind. The master is insisting that Tenten is a genius. The Hokage is politely disbelieving.

As they talk, Tenten looks around. The shiny kunai on the center of his desk, ornamental and lavish, catches her eye. The rubber kunai back at the orphanage has a wooden handle, and the wrapping is frayed. This handle is red silk and embroidered with gold flowers. It makes Tenten think of warm weather, and a soft shirt that smelled like trees.

She tries to reach it, but she is too small and her knees are wobbly. She doesn't gurgle her demand, but silently focuses on her adversary, pulling and reaching until her fingers sneak up over the lip of the desk. The master hasn't noticed her progress, but the Hokage has, and he watches her struggle. She manages to tip over the stand and the kunai slips off to drop into the floor. Its fall is marked by a heavy _thwuuud_, and the master sees.

"Tenten!" shrieks the master, but Tenten is arrested by the sight of the kunai, the silver blade in the light. She pets the handle and the silk is so nice, so different from her cotton shift, that she wraps her fingers around it and refuses to let go.

It is familiar.

* * *

At age twelve, Tenten impresses her new sensei with her ornamental kunai. It is old, an antique, and Gai and Lee and Neji can all tell this just from looking at it. They don't know that it was a half-bribe for the Hokage from her parents, asking that Konoha foster their daughter with her oddly tilted eyes and penchant for silk clothes. Tenten didn't know, either, until she graduated two days ago and the same Hokage who watched her with steepled fingers gave it to her, along with the heavy key to a trunk full of sweet-smelling clothes.

"Remember," he told her, "that while you are a shinobi of Konoha, you will always have parts of you that are different. Use them."

She nails Hyuuga Neji to a tree with her dull, antique kunai, and feels triumph flood her at the silky _phwud_ it makes through his sleeve.

"YOSH!" cries her sensei.

Lee gives her the Good Guy pose.

Neji glares and rips his sleeve removing the heavy kunai.

* * *

At age twenty, Mai-chan, the new maid who is small and demure and serves tea with a provocatively turned inner wrist, is summoned to the master's room.

He watches from the dark corner, smile twisting his lips, as she slides the door shut and jerks a short but graceful bow, and he says, "Mai-chan. Come closer."

"S-sir," she stutters, blushing, cloud of mahogany hair twisting around her head to hide her eyes. "I-I would like t-to know what-t it is y-you require."

He puts down the senbon he automatically grabbed at the twitch of the door and stretches out a hand, quirking his fingers. "Come, come Mai-chan. I think you know what I require, and I won't get it if you are across the room." His eyes catch the flash of blue at her ears, pink at her cheeks, and bare gold at her feet.

Her rustling yukata, _swshoosh swshoosh swshoosh_, releases the scent of jasmine as she crosses the room in small, polite steps. She is still looking down when she hesitantly accepts his offered hand. He grasps her wrist instead of her palm, and the skin is just as smooth as it looked pouring tea.

"Mai-chan," he murmurs into her neck, and pulls her warm body into his lap. He kisses her collarbone and her ear and is gently tugging on the tie of her yukata when she picks up a wooden chopstick from the lip of the forgotten bowl of rice at his feet and drives it into his skull.

The muscles in her delicate, tea-pouring wrist are firm.

* * *

"Tenten!" cries Lee, when she is clean and presentable and her hair caught up behind her emotionless porcelain mask.

"He's dead," she says, slipping a final kunai up her sleeve. "We can go now."

Neji, as mission leader, is really the only one who has the authority to say when they will leave and when they will go, but both he and Tenten are ANBU, and he trusts her when she says that the mission is finished.

"YOSH!" yells Lee, and is quickly shushed.

"Do you want us to get caught?" asks Tenten, lightly smacking him on the back of the head. Although the mask hides her emotions, Neji knows from the tension falling out of her body that she will be fine. She is always fine.

"We eat," says Neji through his mask. "Then we will depart."

They leap through the trees and settle in a clearing that is a proper distance away. Lee unpacks dumplings and Tenten's favorite, fresh dango. Neji hands her a pair of portable chopsticks.

She doesn't pause as she pulls them apart with a _crack_ of splintering wood. Half-smiling at Lee's antics, she spears a loose ball with her chopstick and bites it in half. The sweetness spreads on her tongue, and she smiles for real.

"Good dango, Lee," she says, and sucks the rest of the dough off the chopstick.

* * *

_Ahh . . . the end. Thoughts?  
_


End file.
